Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Lawson

A courtroom arranged like a dinner party is Lawson at his most quietly savage: the architecture of justice aping the architecture of “polite society,” right down to who sits where. The line is observational on the surface - women left, men right, a partition in between - but its bite comes from the throwaway aside, “as it is on the stairs or the block.” He’s not describing a neutral custom; he’s exposing how deeply segregation is rehearsed, naturalized, and then imported into spaces that pretend to be impartial.

Lawson’s specific intent is to puncture the myth that the law stands outside social prejudice. The dock and bench face each other as if truth will emerge from procedure, yet the room is already a lesson in hierarchy: bodies sorted, voices anticipated, propriety enforced. The partition is literal, but the subtext is broader - a culture that calls itself civilized while policing intimacy, visibility, and credibility. If men and women are separated even in the mundane choreography of public life, what happens when a case depends on who is believed, who is shamed, who is protected?

Context matters: Lawson wrote with a realist’s suspicion toward institutions in turn-of-the-century Australia, attuned to class pieties and the moral theater of respectability. The phrase “polite society” is doing double duty, naming both the aspirational social class and the performance it demands. The joke is grim: the court isn’t correcting society’s biases; it’s staging them with better furniture.